You Know Now
by Gypsy Love
Summary: Sort of Crellie. Craig and Ellie deal with things in the aftermath of Ashley's e mail break up.
1. Chapter 1

The day was shot. It was too late, that gray dead late afternoon time when things seemed hopeless. Even the coffee wasn't working. He still felt enervated.

"You shouldn't be drinking coffee," Joey said as Craig raised the coffee cup to his lips. His eyes widened over the edge of the cup.

"Joey, I'm in grade 12. I think I can drink coffee,"

Joey smiled a little and shook his head, and Craig thought he was looking older lately, the lines around his eyes were a little deeper. He thought of his mother and his dad, both of them frozen in time, frozen at ages that made sense to him. He couldn't get used to Joey getting old.

Still, the dead time dragged on and Craig watched the gloom gather in the corners, the light dim outside and the streetlights flicker on. Looked at the flecks of coffee grounds and sugar sludge at the bottom of his coffee cup and Joey suggested pizza for dinner again. 

Angie was somewhere, Girl Scouts or ice skating or piano, Craig had stopped keeping track of her activities. He put his feet up on the coffee table and leaned his head against his hand, watched Joey speed dial the pizza place.

Caitlin was gone, Ashley was gone. Joey dated from time to time, his usual type, too. Young, skinny/curvy, deeply tan, long black hair. Like his mother, Craig thought, except his mother had been older than Joey. She'd been coming up in his thoughts more and more.

He didn't really want the pizza but ate two slices anyway. Joey asked him if he was remembering his medication and Craig cringed at the question, said yeah quickly and changed the subject.

"I guess I'm gonna go in the garage," Craig said, tossing his pizza crusts into the trash. Joey nodded at him, cracking open his bottle of wine. He seemed to drink a little more now that Caitlin was in L.A. And he never watched any Kevin Smith movies.

The garage was always cold, for some reason. Craig shivered, pulled on his faded jean jacket. The guitar sat propped in a corner, gleaming dully. He regarded it, not really wanting to play it. Not really wanting to do anything. He kept replaying the scene at The Dot when Spinner spilled it that Ashley dumped him. Spinner. Jesus. How could Ellie do that to him?

He did pick up the guitar, strummed some chords, fiddled with some melodies, and it soothed him. The tap at the door didn't register for a while. But he heard it, tap tap tap, and he set the guitar down in the same corner, answered the door.

"Ellie," he said dully, opening the door and turning away from her. She looked good, dark make-up, smooth shiny red hair, her clothes toned down from the costume like outfits she used to wear. 

"Hi, Craig,"

He sat down heavily on the couch, wouldn't look at her.

"C'mon, Craig, don't be this way," she said, trying to get him to look at her. He heard the pleading in her voice.

"C'mon, nothing, Ellie! How could you do that to me? I mean, you told everyone Ash dumped me. You told _Spinner_," He was still turned away from her. 

"Alright, look. You shouldn't be mad at me. I'm not the one who dumped you. It was Ashley. So don't take this out on me,"

He stood up fast, walked across the room. Head down, eyes narrowed, looking out the window.

"You should have told me," he said, crossing his arms.

"So maybe I wanted to protect you-" she started to say, her funny little gold eyes almost filling with tears. He whipped his head around, swallowed hard.

"Ellie, I don't need you to protect me! Okay, I'm not so…broken…or needy, or whatever. You should have just told me. Instead you tell Paige and Marco and fucking Spinner-"

"Ashley should have been the one to tell you," Ellie bit the edge of one fingernail. Her nails were painted black, just a little hint of her gothic past.

"Yeah, but you knew! Ellie, you knew, so you should have told me,"

Ellie shook her head, a few tears slid down her cheek.

"I just can't win with you, Craig. What do you want me to do? Go back in time and tell you? Okay, maybe I should have told you, maybe. But you know now, so deal with it," She turned on her heel and left, the door shutting behind her as she pulled it in one smooth motion. Craig stood in the center of the room and watched her go.

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Ellie sat in the booth at the pizza place, an uneaten slice of pepperoni in front of her. She leaned her head on Marco's shoulder and sniffled. From time to time she would bury her face in his shoulder. He patted her head every so often and tried not to drip any of his pizza sauce or toppings on her.

"He's so mad at me," she said. Marco shook his head.

"He's mad at Ashley. But you're the one who's here,"

"It isn't fair. It's just, I can't compete with Ashley. He's hopelessly in love with her. I should just give up on him," Marco finished up his slice, licked his fingertips, wiped his lips with a napkin.

"It would be easier. Craig's kind of…"

"Kind of what?" Ellie lifted her head up, glanced at the swinging green covered lights that hung over every booth.

"Kind of not good at relationships,"

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Ellie sat at the one bar in town that would serve her drinks. The bouncer at this bar would just smile at her, stamp her hand. But she was close to 19, getting closer every day. What was the big deal? And she ordered serious drinks, manhattens with southern comfort, martinis with Bombay sapphire gin. She'd sip and sip, feeling the worry and the sharp hurt that Craig was causing her erode as the toxins made their way through her blood stream and to her brain. Her mother non-withstanding. So her mother drank to dull the pain of her father leaving and whatever other pain with the twisted roots she felt and dealt with. Ellie didn't know, didn't know her mother really at all, but she felt that maybe she was beginning to understand her. A little more, anyway.

As she drank she thought that maybe the pain Craig was causing her was starting to outweigh any pleasure she got from this twisted little co-dependent relationship. What was she to him? Some other fucked up person in group? Someone who could understand having difficult parents and a diagnosable problem? He used her. He didn't value her for herself, only for what she could do for him. She dug out the olive from the bottom of her drink, bloated and choked with alcohol. Sometimes she hated Craig Manning.


	2. Chapter 2

She woke up hung over, but that wasn't new. The dull headache. The thirst. She'd been dreaming of big glasses of soda and lemonade. She'd been tossing and turning, trying to shrink away from the headache that was a steel band pressing on her head.

School day. That added insult to injury. She hated sitting in homeroom with her mouth all dry and the Tylenol not even touching the sick throbbing of her head. Was drinking worth this? It always seemed worth it as the drinks went down nice and smooth and wore away the edges of her life. It seemed okay when she drank her martinis and manhattans and Craig and Craig's reaction to the whole Ashley thing seemed to matter less and less. The drinks gave her perspective.

She thought she'd been a bit too hard on her mother. It made more sense now. Her father had gone to Iraq where he could easily be killed, and left her mother alone with a gothic cutting nut of a teenage daughter. If she needed a little drink to see her through who was she to judge?

Ellie stood up slowly but still felt the pain of her movement shaking the headache and she moaned. Felt queasy. Maybe it hadn't been worth it.

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"Craig? You've been moping around here for days. What's wrong?" Joey said, and Craig looked at the sunlight falling in through the window, shining on the metal of the sink. He dumped sugar and cream into his coffee and stirred. Shrugged at Joey's questions/observations. Craig had noticed a change in his relationship with Joey. It was less stepfather/stepson and more roommate like. Joey went his way and he went his, and the rules had really slacked off. That was just fine with Craig.

"Nothing," he said, because Joey seemed to want a verbal answer. And he got the patented raised eyebrow.

"Okay, it's Ashley,"

"Ashley?" Joey looked surprised, "what about her?"

"She's staying in England, she met some guy, everyone knew about it including Spinner-"

"Craig?" Craig looked up and saw the roommate visage falling away, and in Joey's serious expression he saw stepfather/father, and he felt a little fear at that.

"What?" he said, seeing how Joey was worrying about his medication and worrying about him having another Ashley based "episode" and he looked down.

"You've got to let Ashley go,"

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Her dark sunglasses didn't help with the glare or the headache that persisted despite four Tylenols. She sipped from a bottle of water, trying to beat back the dehydration but her head still thumped with every footstep and she wanted to curl up in a dark room somewhere and sleep until noon.

"Ellie!" She braced herself as Marco hugged her, and he looked at her critically, taking in the dark glasses and somber demeanor.

"Ellie? Have you been drowning your sorrows?"

She cleared her throat, squinted against the sun even behind her dark glasses.

"Maybe. But they resurfaced like a corpse in Boston Harbor," Marco laughed, and then he spotted Craig.

"Don't look now, but here he comes,"


	3. Chapter 3

The boredom of the classes sometimes made Craig want to scratch his eyes out. He absent mindedly tapped on the veins on the back of his hand, watched how they seemed to swell with blood. He thought of drugs, heroin and cocaine. Since becoming "bipolar" he'd been warned about the tendency toward drug use. Of course he wouldn't do that, he'd never do that. But he could imagine all too well the relief it might bring.

Maybe he was consciously avoiding Ellie. He knew she was hung over because of the dark glasses. Knew he was probably the reason she'd been drinking and didn't care, not for the moment. It somehow hurt him worse that she wouldn't tell him about Ashley, that she wouldn't trust him with that. He'd thought that she understood that he was better. He had felt better, after being hospitalized again after Joey came and got him at that soup kitchen. He'd been present in some weird way, despite the racing thoughts and the hunger and the pain from Skinny beating him up. He had known what he was saying.

After that hospitalization, which was shorter than the first one, once he was stable, he was better. So what if he basically only hung out with Ellie? So what if he thought she knew what it meant to be sick and to get better? Why he thought Ashley would be back after the way she left was beyond him now but he thought it. The promise of her return kept him going through that long dull summer. Ellie totally getting it, getting that he really wasn't such damaged goods kept him going. Now both those things were gone.

He saw Ellie hiding behind her dark glasses, big as a bug's eyes. He saw Marco hovering protectively over her and saw both of them looking at him. He couldn't face her. He was still too pissed.

So he ran, which was what he always did when things got tough. When his parents would fight when he was little he'd run up to his room and hide in the closet, and later he'd run out the doors and down the roads. He had to get away. When his father was being abusive and it was getting worse, he packed his bag and ran. He could have made it to British Columbia. When Joey accosted him with demands for rent, he ran to Sean's shit hole apartment in China town. And when Ashley looked at him with her eyes filled with tears, her eyes an unreal sea green through the tears, when she said she had to get away from him he ran. It was how he dealt with the things that hurt him.

Down the halls, out the doors, into the cool September air. His birthday. His age always exactly coinciding with the start of school. His birthday always sucking. His mother dying in September when he was 11, just turned 11. He had stared into the space of that September, not quite knowing how to go on. Joey's choked up face, tear stained cheeks, beard stubble. He had grabbed him in a rough hug at the funeral and that was all he could feel, the sharp beard stubble against his soft cheek. Then 12. He'd done something wrong, whatever it had been and his father staring at him behind the black framed glasses, like some skewed Buddy Holly. 13 and he was more finely attuned to his father's moods but still it hadn't helped. He'd spent his 13th birthday in his room, his fists clenched and his door locked, and he vowed that one more hit or lick of the belt would send him so far away, but it would be a year of it until he'd leave. Then 14, his father running up the stairs after him and swinging the golf club at his closed door, each time it hit his heart pounded in his chest. Maybe 15 he'd been okay. Just that one time out of 17 years he'd escaped the curse of his birthday.

He hated school, he hated Ellie, he hated Ashley. He hated Joey asking him about his medication. There was only one escape when it came down to this. He licked his lips and slowed down from a run to a walk, and he could feel the cool air against his exposed skin. There was only one place to go with all this anger and misery. He walked until he reached the garage, Joey's garage. The guitar gleaming in the dull filtered light, leaning in the corner. It was his only release.

The guitar felt as right in his grasp as the camera used to feel. Even picking it up he felt some of the tension drain away. How could Ellie do that do him? Didn't she trust him at all?

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Ellie watched Craig from behind her giant black glasses. Watched him stop and stare like some deer in the road at night, the car bearing down on him. Watched him turn and head for the double glass doors.

"Uh, Ellie?" Marco said, staring after him.

"Yeah?"

"I think he's still mad,"


End file.
